Andrew Wakefield Timeline

AW

When I was researching Andrew Wakefield’s story I found it incredibly confusing, and eventually I wrote up a timeline of events to help me make sense of it. I’m putting 2 versions of it here (brief and extended timelines) to help anyone else who might be in the same position.

I’ve included a little background on autism, and put a small collection of videos of Andrew speaking at the end – Robin

Terms

ASD – Autism Spectrum Disorder
MMR – ‘trivalent’ vaccine, containing vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella. Contains weakened live viruses, and has never contained mercury.
GMC – General Medical Council – body governing doctors in UK
DoH – Department of Health, in UK
CDC – Center for Disease Control and Protection – main government health authority in US
Royal Free – teaching hospital in London, part of University of London, has both clinical and research doctors
EC – the ethics committee at the Royal Free
NHS – National Health Service – health funding provider in the UK
LAB – Legal Aid Board – gov’t funded legal help in UK
Lancet – major medical journal, based in UK – owned by publishing company Elsevier
BMJ – major medical journal, used to be British Medical Journal – owned by the British Medical Association, a professional association and registered trade union for UK doctors
GSK – GlaxoSmithKline – manufacturers of MMR in UK
SKFB – SmithKlineFrench-Beecham – an earlier name for GSK
Merck – manufacturers of MMR in US
IOM – Institute of Medicine (since June 2015 known as National Academy of Medicine) – private body in the US that informs public policy decisions
Vaccine Court – informal name for US ‘National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program’ through which people can receive compensation for vaccine injury. People have been unable to sue vaccine manufacturers in the US, partially since 1986 and fully since 2011.

Players

AW – Dr Andrew Wakefield, Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB, BS), FRCS, FRCPath. He is a British gastroenerologist and surgeon, is married to Carmel who is also a doctor, has 4 kids. His older 2 children were fully vaccinated and had received the MMR, he did not question vaccination before doing his autism-related research.
JW-S – Professor John Walker-Smith, world’s leading pediatric gastroenterologist (back in the 1990s). Retired in 2001.
SM – Dr Simon Murch, now Professor, one of the 3 main authors of the ‘Lancet 12’ paper.
BD – Brian Deer – occasional freelance UK journalist (with very little work to his name, apart from his AW stories)
Richard Horton – editor of the Lancet from 1995
FG – Dr Fiona Godlee – editor of BMJ, from early 2005
Dr William Thompson – known as “CDC whistleblower”. A sixteen year veteran and a senior scientist at CDC’s Immunology Safety Office. He has invoked the protection of the Federal Whistleblower Statute, and still works at the CDC.
Dr. Julie Gerberding – director of CDC from 2002 to January 2009, joined Merck as president of Merck Vaccines in January 2010

Brief timeline

1996 – July, AW’s team begins the ‘Lancet 12’ study, which is a case series.

2010 – May. GMC announces decisions: JW-S and AW both to be disbarred depending on an appeal to high court (AW could not afford appeal to high court so is disbarred). SM not disbarred.

2011 – January. Brian Deer publishes 3-part series in the BMJ, saying the data in the Lancet 12 paper was “fixed”.

2012 – February-March. JW-S takes appeal to High Court and wins, clearing his name (though he retired in 2001).

Extended timeline

1920s – Morris Kharasch invents 3 commercial uses for ethyl mercury, a water soluble and very toxic form of mercury. They are as seed disinfectant, lumber (timber) preservative and the vaccine preservative called both Merthiolate and Thimerosal.

1931 – Thimerosal first used, in a diphtheria vaccine.

1931 – Earliest known birth of a child later diagnosed with autism.

1938 – First child of 11 is examined by psychiatrist Leo Kenner for his 1943 landmark report naming and describing autism.

1995 – April 29. AW is a co-author of a paper published, which links Inflammatory Bowel Disease with measles vaccine. Find the paper Is measles vaccination a risk factor for inflammatory bowel disease?here.

Note – there may well be other papers from this period, AW has published altogether around 140 peer-reviewed papers in established science journals in his career.

1995 – May. First ‘Lancet 12’ mother contacts AW looking for help, as a result of hearing about his work. She says her son regressed into autism after MMR, and he has terrible bowel problems. Note – in this period the MMR was given by itself in the UK, rather than along with other vaccines.

1995 – September, JW-S transfers to Royal Free

1995 – on arrival, EC gives JW-S generic ethical approval no 162-95 for his clinical work to be used for research. This document is kept in the EC files, not by the doctor.

1996 – July, AW’s team begins the ‘Lancet 12’ study, which is a case series – a case series is called an ‘Early Report’ in the Lancet. Each child is investigated clinically by JW-S on the ward, so they can be helped, which requires no approval from hospital’s ethics committee, the same as any visit to a doctor. Biopsy and other results are also recorded by research team, under the EC generic approval 162-95 given to JW-S. The families have NHS funding, the same as for any sick person, and doctors are paid their normal wages.

1996 – AW applies to EC for approval 172-96 to conduct research of biopsies of autistic children with bowel problems who are coming to the hospital to be treated clinically (these followed the ‘Lancet 12’ children). Approval is given December 1996, at which time many of the ‘Lancet 12′ children had already been investigated. This research is never undertaken as funding isn’t forthcoming.

1997 – January. Last Lancet 12 child investigated. Many more with same issues continue to be seen – by early 1998 about 50 altogether, by end 1999 about 2000 on the waiting list.

1997 – September 4. Funding for AW’s viral detection study is made available by the hospital, the study starts in October. Its purpose is to determine if there is some evidence to help litigation against the vaccine manufacturers – it is funded by the Legal Aid Board, through lawyers for the families. AW receives consultancy fees for this, as do all doctors who do work for litigation (many of AW’s detractors receive huge sums this way, working for the pharmaceutical companies’ defence in litigation). AW later says he donated his consultancy fees to the hospital, I for one believe him. The litigation never eventuates.

1997-8 – AW knows the Lancet 12 paper’s findings will be controversial, so he researches safety studies done on MMR, so he can back up what he is saying. He is appalled by the shortcomings of these studies. He writes a 250-page report on this, and gives it to all doctors on his team and relevant staff at the hospital.

1998 – February 28. Dean of the hospital Professor Arie Zuckerman holds a press conference to publicise the paper. A journalist asks whether doctors would recommend the MMR to families, AW replies that he would advise further investigation into MMR, meanwhile he suggests use of the single measles vaccine – this is exactly what he told Zuckerman he would say if asked. This statement causes great controversy.

1998 – April 26. First of two secret meetings where whistleblower “George”, a doctor who works for DoH in Scotland, passes information to AW about Urabe strain of mumps virus in MMR, used 1988-1992. He says Urabe had caused encephalitis in Canada, and DoH knew about this before they introduced it in 1988, and DoH even appear to have indemnified manufacturers GSK (then SKFB) against being sued for damage – this may explain why the government are so keen to silence AW (there had been attempts to silence AW before the paper was published). AW attends a second meeting a year later – both meetings are held in a cafe at Newcastle railway station. “George” later reveals his name and that he lives in Edinburgh. More about Urabe.

1998 – August. Many UK families have opted for single measles vaccine over MMR, as a result of AW’s recommendation, lowering uptake of MMR and increasing uptake of the single measles vaccine. In August the government withdraws licence for the single dose vaccine, forcing families to choose between the MMR or no measles vaccine, so measles vaccination declines. (Later on, measles starts to come back and the government blames AW for this, which is still reported today – even though he actually recommended the single measles vaccine which was available at the time.)

1999 – September. AW completes the Legal Aid Board funded pilot study, an investigation into whether vaccine strain of measles virus is found in intestines of autistic children who had regressed after vaccination.

2000 – One in 150 8-yr-old children in USA have ASD, extrapolated from surveys in 6 states.

2000 – April. Congress hearings with Rep. Dan Burton Autism and Childhood Vaccines begin, they last for 3 years.

2000 – AW and colleagues publish a hypothesis that children receiving MMR at a younger age are more at risk of developing autism. AW takes this to the US Congress hearings, and Congress asks the CDC to investigate it.

2000 – May. Simpsonwood meeting – secret CDC conference in isolated rural location to discuss how to hide the strong vaccine-autism connection their research has found – the CDC invites people from FDA, WHO, every major vaccine manufacturer. Robert F Kennedy Jr later writes about this in his article Deadly Immunity here.

2001 – CDC begins a study to investigate the hypothesis AW presented to Congress in 2000.

2001 – AW leaves Royal Free hospital.

2001 – JW-S retires, aged 64 or thereabouts.

2001 – AW becomes Fellow of Royal College of Pathologists (FRCPath).

2003 – June. Richard Horton publishes his book Second Opinion, telling several stories of the terrible pressure he has been put under for publishing the Lancet 12 paper in 1998. Such as the terrible time he had at a dinner party.

2003 – September. Litigation by families against MMR manufacturers is thwarted by UK government, denying thousands of families compensation for lives ruined, and financial help they needed. With court cases out of the way, people are free to start the process of silencing AW and the research findings.

2003 – November. USA scientist Dr Thomas Verstraeten publishes study concluding no association between mercury in vaccines and neurodevelopment disorders, including autism (this was the research discussed at the Simpsonwood meeting in 2000). He had been working for the CDC, but by the time the study is published he is working for GSK. Together with 4 other studies, these form basis of IOM’s landmark decalaration that vaccines do not cause autism, in 2004.

2003 – December 15. The UK’s Channel 5 airs a TV film they have made about AW’s work in the period 1995-2000: Hear The Silence. After one airing Channel 5 withdraws it and it disappears, and it resurfaces here in 2013. It’s worth watching.

2004 – February 9. At an IOM meeting in the US, the CDC announces results of findings of study started in 2001, designed to test AW’s hypothesis, with a talk given by study’s lead author Dr Frank De Stefano. The results had confirmed AW’s hypothesis, but the authors have fraudulently changed their findings, and Stafano lies at the meeting (see whistleblower notes 2013 onward). This paper is also used as a basis for the IOM’s declaration that vaccines do not cause autism.

2004 – February 9. Based on results of 5 epidemiological studies, including the Verstraeten and De Stefano papers above, the IOM announces that there is no link between thimerosal and autism. It says no further funding should be given to vaccine safety research, and 5,000 cases are pulled from Vaccine Court based on that decision, denying families compensation. All 5 studies are flawed and/or rigged.

2004 – February 22. Brian Deer publishes two articles in Murdoch’s Sunday Times newspaper, attacking AW and the Lancet 12 paper. The gist of the allegations are:
1. AW was paid £55,000 by the Legal Aid Board to conduct the Lancet 12 study, so he had a conflict of interest (this money was for a different study)
2. AW did not tell the other authors his involvement in upcoming possible litigation (this is untrue and there is documentary evidence against it).
3. Clinical tests were inappropriate, invasive and unethical (tests were overseen by JW-S who determined they were clinically indicated).
4. Although the Lancet 12 paper contained no confirmed link between the MMR and illness, AW warned against the MMR at the press conference (AW had done a comprehensive investigation into safety studies done on the MMR and found them lacking).

2004 – March 6. Lancet publishes result of investigation into ‘Lancet 12’ paper, which totally supports the authors and their methods: A statement by The Royal Free and University College Medical School and The Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust by Prof H Hodgson. You can find it on the Lancet but I also found it here.

2004 – March 6. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, has now asked the 13 doctors to retract the suggestion that MMR possibly caused the autism. Ten agree, out of fear for their careers, with a statement published in the Lancet Retraction of an interpretationhere (paid) and here (free) which actually supports the paper. One doctor could not be contacted and two refuse, AW and P Harvey, saying they are not going to make liars out of the parents, and it is nonsensical to retract a suggestion that something is a possibility. Note – this is not the full retraction of the paper, that happens later, in 2010.

2004 – The Lancet journal is owned by Elsevier publishing. The Chief Executive Officer of parent company Reed Elsevier, Sir Crispin Davis, is also a Non Executive Director of GSK.

2004 – March. Sir Crispin Davis fails to disclose his conflicts of interest while denouncing Andrew Wakefield to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. Which are that he is a non-executive director of MMR manufacturers GSK, and that his brother and High Court judge Sir Nigel Davis had endorsed the Legal Services Commission’s decision to stop funding of the MMR litigation.

2004 – Brian Deer writes to the GMC about the doctors, this results in the Fitness to Practise hearing charging AW, JW-S and SM that starts in 2007.

2004 – July. Richard Smith steps down from his position as editor and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group (where he managed profits of 25 journals including the BMJ) which he had held for 13 years – he was editor of BMJ a further 12 years before that. He gives a talk a few months later, written up as Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies here.

2004 – September. Richard Horton publishes his book MMR: Science and Fiction, where he tells of the UK government pushing for the GMC to pursue AW as a matter of urgency.

2004 – In both the Sunday Times articles and Dispatches program, Brian Deer accuses AW of trying to gain financially from the MMR controversy by attempting to compete with the measles vaccine by having his own measles vaccine, because AW filed a patent application for a measles vaccine/therapeutic agent called ‘transfer factor’ back in 1997. Find AW’s patent claim here, and AW’s reply to Brian Deer here (both are well worth a read). Note – this potential therapeutic agent for treatment of bowel disease was never developed commercially.

2004 – AW and family move to Austin Texas (they still live there)

2005 – February. Fiona Godlee becomes editor of BMJ.

2006 – One in 110 8-yr-old children in USA have ASD, extrapolated from surveys in 11 states

2007 – June. In the US, 10-yr-old Bailey Banks’ parents win case in Vaccine Court claiming his autism is caused by MMR, in 2009 they are awarded $810,000 plus $35,000 annually, see here.

2007 – July 16. Hearing at GMC starts, charging 3 doctors, AW, JW-S and SM, lasts nearly 3 years all up. It is conducted by a GMC Fitness to Practise panel, consisting of 3 doctors and 2 lay people. The chairman Dr Surendra Kumar fails to disclose that he owns shares in MMR manufacturer GSK or that he sits on two medicine licensing authority committees, but when it is revealed during the hearing he is not replaced (as was the doctor first appointed to the role, for conflict of interest).

This hearing was initiated by a letter from Brian Deer in 2004, and is regarding the 11 of the 12 children who are UK citizens (one is from the US). The parents of these 11 children have not complained about the doctors, they are extremely supportive of them (the father of the US child, child 11, is angry with AW for unknown reasons not related to the paper’s findings or his son’s treatment). Fitness to Practise hearings at the GMC are usually brought about by complaints from patients, not letters from part-time freelance journalists.

2009 – January 27. Last day of testimony at GMC hearings, before closing submissions start.

2009 – February 8. Brian Deer writes two articles in the Sunday Times, claiming AW had ‘fixed data’ in the Lancet 12 paper. The Sunday Times is at this time managed by James Murdoch, who has just been appointed to the board of GSK. The doctors were never charged with fixing data in 3 years of GMC hearings.

2009 – May. An excellent film is released: Selective Hearing: Brian Deer and the GMC. Find it here.

2010 – January 28. GMC finds all 3 doctors guilty, to various degrees. The GMC charge sheet with the findings is here – it makes tortuous and convoluted reading, so as an aid I have drawn up a table of contents for the Andrew Wakefield section, which runs up to page 55. You will notice there is no mention of fabrication of results.

The main problem with the findings is the Panel couldn’t get their facts straight – they take the Legal Aid Board funding, NHS funding, three different studies*, and approval docs 162-95 & 172-96, and throw them all up in the air and they all come down in the wrong places, in weird combinations.

It is hard to refute something that is utter nonsense in a few simple sentences – it is no wonder High-Court judge Justice Mitting said after JW-S’s appeal in 2012: “inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion” and “It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again” and that in future such cases should be “chaired by someone with judicial experience”.

2010 – February 2. Editor of Lancet, Richard Horton, retracts AW’s Lancet 12 paper, the only specific reasons he gives are: “In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were consecutively referred and that investigations were approved by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false”. He does not mention any problems with the paper’s observations. He announces this at a conference of health officials, who clap and cheer and high-five each other. This is now 12 years after publication.

Find a copy of the retraction document here. There is also a link to the retraction statement on the right of the paper itself – if you sign up so you can see Full Text you don’t see any more than is on the Summary, it just has the 2 references added.

Note – the claim about consecutive referral is decisively refuted by Justice Mitting in 2012, in JW-S’s appeal here, paragraph 157. Mitting also demolishes the claim that the doctors did not have EC approval, when he discusses permission 162-95 given to JW-S, in paragraph 20, and with several statements that he does not believe the Lancet 12 paper had approval document 172-96 . These factors are considered by many to be grounds for the retraction to be revoked, see this article.

2010 – February 12. A paper co-authored by AW testing the US vaccination schedule on baby primates, published online – ahead of print – a few months earlier in the journal Neurotoxicology, is withdrawn from the journal’s website and will not be published. This decision was not made by the editor on scientific grounds, but by the journal’s owner, Elsevier. Read about it here.

2010 – May 24. GMC announces decisions: JW-S to be disbarred depending on appeal to high court (covered by his insurance). AW disbarred as he could not afford appeal to high court (costing £500,000, his insurance would not cover it). SM found guilty of minor issues and not disbarred.

2010 – May 24. AW publishes his book Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines: The Truth Behind a Tragedy, available on Amazon (see sidebar). It is essentially a collection of essays, written during the period of the hearings.

2010 – One in 68 8-yr-old children (one in 42 boys, one in 189 girls) in USA have ASD, extrapolated from surveys in 11 states (results published in 2014)

2011 – January. Brian Deer publishes 3-part series in the BMJ, saying the data in the Lancet 12 paper was “fixed”, on January 6, January 11 and January 18. Deer’s “fixing” claims revolve around discrepencies between children’s confidential NHS medical records which had been given to him, and their records in the Lancet 12 paper, and also different versions of pathology reports.

2011 – January 6. Editor of BMJ Fiona Godlee supports Deer’s articles in her editorial, saying AW’s paper was “fraudulent” and “an elaborate fraud”. This, and Deer’s 2009 Sunday Times articles, are where the accusations of fraud come from, not from the GMC hearing, where there was no charge of fraud or of falsifying results. Fiona Godlee states that Deer’s articles had been independently peer-reviewed, but this turns out to be false, see here.

2011 – Here are some points about the BMJ:

The BMJ is dependant on funding from the pharmaceutical industry for survival, according to Richard Smith, CEO of BMJ Publishing Group for many years, and Fiona Godlee’s predecessor (see 2004 notes).

The BMJ is owned by the UK’s doctors’ trade union, the British Medical Association – doctors are dependent on the pharmaceutical companies for their professional survival.

A BMJ editor who “checked” Deer’s articles has pharmaceutical links.

The BMJ has a business partnership with Merck for educational materials.

2011 – A journalist from Age of Autism interviews child 11’s father who strongly denies Deer’s claim that his son had symptoms before the MMR shot, so debunking a key allegation. Deer replies on his blog: “who can say, years later?” here. Astonishing stuff.

2011 – The other 2 main tenets of fraud claim are also debunked – Deer’s cherry-picked information from the children’s NHS records can easily be shown to be insignificant, and the process of investigating the pathology was to have a routine report followed by a report from an expert (which had different findings, because he knew more).

2012 – January. AW sues BMJ, FG and BD for libel regarding the BMJ articles, from a court in Austin Texas. Judge says court has no jurisdiction over the 3 British defendants – this should not be a problem, as AW was a Texas resident at the time of the BMJ articles. AW appeals – in his final appeal the court’s decision is upheald, September 19 2014. The court’s judiciary are found to have links to pharmaceutical companies, see here.

2012 – February-March. JW-S takes appeal to High Court and wins, clearing his name (though he retired in 2001). GMC is roundly criticised by the judge, Justice Mitting, who says of the GMC hearing: “inadequate and superficial reasoning and, in a number of instances, a wrong conclusion” here, paragraph 186.

Justice Mitting also says “It would be a misfortune if this were to happen again” and he urges that in future such cases should be “chaired by someone with judicial experience” here. Note – AW has never been tried in a court of law.

See 2010 notes about why this turn of events means the Lancet paper should be reinstated.

2013 – November. Dr William Thompson, a senior scientist at the CDC, contacts biochemist Dr Brian Hooker, saying he has decided to come clean on CDC corruption regarding vaccines. Over the next several months they have more than 30 telephone conversations.

2014 – May 8 to July 28. Four of the phone calls are recorded – Thompson does not know he is being recorded, so speaks freely. The recordings are transcribed.

2014 – August. Dr William Thompson goes public, saying the research his group at the CDC conducted starting 2001 and published 2004, to investigate the hypothesis AW presented to Congress in 2000, found a confirmation of the hypothesis but they hid their results. He also says he was pressured by his bosses to hide links between mercury in vaccines and brain damage. He has kept records for 12 years (over 100,000 pages of documents), and he takes them to Rep. Bill Posey, a member of Congress, and is given whistleblower immunity.

When Thompson had complained in 2004 to then head of the CDC, Dr. Julie Gerberding, that his department was telling lies, he was threatened with dismissal by his boss. In 2010 Gerberding joined Merck to become head of Merck Vaccines, the US manufacturer of vaccines (two years earlier she had approved Merck’s HIV vaccine for girls, worth estimated one billion dollars).

2015 – July 29. Rep. Bill Posey from Florida speaks to Congress, calling for an investigation of Dr William Thompson’s documents.

2015 – Aug 20. Book Vaccine Whistleblower by Kevin Barry is published. It includes transcriptions of the 4 recorded phone calls between Dr. William Thompson and Brian Hooker.

2015 – November 13. CDC releases results of a study, US autism rate is estimated 1 in 45 children aged 3 – 17 years, data collected in 2014. Report is found in CDC’s National Health Statistics Reports, November 13 2015, no 87, and sharp rise in autism is attributed to a change in data collection methods.

2016 – January 26. William Thompson’s 100,000 pages of documents are finally realeased to the public by journalist Ben Swann, along with a documentary about the situation, here.

2016 – March 22. It is announced that Andrew Wakefield’s new film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, which is about the CDC coverups revealed by William Thompson, will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, late April. This announcement causes a flurry of protests, and on March 26 the festival backs down and removes the film.

2016 – March 29. It is announced that Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe will now premiere Friday April 1st at Angelika Film Center in NYC, and play for a week (it plays for three). It is being distributed by Cinema Libre Studio.

2016 – April. Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe is playing at several theatres in the US.

2016 – April 27. Annoucement that screenwriter Terry Rossio, best known for Shrek and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, has teamed with Dr. Jocelyn Stamat to acquire both the film rights to AW’s book Callous Disregard and AW’s life story rights.

2016 – May onwards. Vaxxed continues to play in theatres across the US and Canada.